Late last month, a large crowd gathered in downtown San Francisco to demand that the AI industry stop developing more powerful bots. Holding signs and banners reading Stop the AI Race and Don't Build Skynet, the protesters marched through the city and gave speeches outside the offices of Anthropic, OpenAI, and xAI. The crowd demanded that these companies halt efforts to create superintelligent machines'and, in particular, AI models that can develop future AI models. Such a technology, attendees said, could extinguish all human life. At AI protests and happy hours, inside start-ups and major companies, the tech world is in a frenzy over the same thing: Computers that make themselves smarter. Over the past year, the top AI companies have taken to loudly bragging about internal efforts to automate their own research. OpenAI recently released a new model it described as 'instrumental in creating itself.' Within the next six months, the company aims to debut what it has described as an...
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